January updates
We are only two weeks in 2016 and it seems like NMBS/SNCB is keeping its promise as a presentation announced they now have an internal innovation project on Open Data. But more inflables interestingly for us, the presentation, geving yesterday at the Digital Agenda Belgium event, announced they were wrong in 2010 sending Yeri a cease and desist letter. While people on twitter responded moderately (“How long is this going to take?”, “How about real-time data?”) we believe this is a huge step forward: it is the first time the NMBS/SNCB acknowledges we were on the right side of history. What iRail is concerned: we would love to start collaborating on a clean slate 🙂
We look forward collaborating with you @nmbs @sncb and start over with a clean slate 🙂 https://t.co/bD72fu6509
— iRail (@iRail) January 13, 2016
It doesn’t stop there, today, we are featured in De Standaard with a piece on how NMBS should make use of their data in a better way:
http://standaard.be/cnt/dmf20160112_02064462
Indeed: the query log files of iRail can be used as an indication of travel intention. You can now also reuse the log files yourself:
- Historic datadump from 2012 to 2016: https://github.com/pietercolpaert/irail-route-planning-query-logs
- Last 1000 requests refreshed each second: http://api.irail.be/logs/